The bicycle has had anything but a smooth ride in the United States. As Robert Turpin tells it in “The First Taste of Freedom,” a history of how the bicycle has been marketed over the years in this country, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s. Bicycling was a phenomenon with adults riding both individually and in clubs. Women found cycling brought new freedom. Production boomed with some 300 manufacturers across the country producing bikes.
Production peaked in 1898 and 1899 with a million bikes produced annually, said Turpin. But just a few years later, the biking craze cooled. U.S. production of bicycles dipped to 200,000 a year by 1905, he said.
The arrival of the automobile at this time obviously played a big part in displacing the bicycle as a transportation wonder, said Turpin.
The U.S. military purchased a lot of bicycles in World War I but couldn’t really find an application for them other than to equip messengers with fresh wheels.
Bicycles enjoyed something of a upturn in the 1930s, Turpin told Steve Tarter, but the emphasis was more on nostalgia—a desire to recreate the golden days of the 1890s--rather than charting an exciting future.
After World War II, manufacturers finally gave up on convincing adults to ride bicycles, said Turpin. Instead the focus was on the youth market. “The bicycle became more of a toy. Replicas were popular,” he said, noting that one of the popular models in the 1950s was a Hopalong Cassidy bike complete with six-shooters mounted right behind the handlebars.
Turpin said a second bike boom came in the 60s and early 70s generated by the popularity of Schwinn’s Sting-Ray, the first bike with a “banana” seat and high-rise handlebars. With the arrival of the oil crisis in 1973, adults finally outpaced children as bike riders, he said.
Interest in exercise helped get bikes moving again in the later years of the 20th century with mountain bikes taking off after their early adoption in California, said Turpin. More recently, biking spiked during the pandemic when bikes became as hard to find as toilet paper.
Only now have biking stocks resumed to a normal level, said Turpin, a longtime bike rider, himself.
Today’s trends? The number of kids who once drove the bicycle market are in decline while electric bikes are on the upswing, he said.
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